Author 



•^ *o^ 




Title 



..^£3. 



Imprint. 



l&-Ht7372-3 «PO 



SPEECH 



HON. LAWRENCE M. KEITT, 

OF SOUTH CAROLINA,' 



ON 



THE ORIGIN OF SLAVERY; 



DELIVERED 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MAY 24, 1858. 






WASHINGTON: 
PRINTED AT THE OFFICE OF THE CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE. 

1858. 



V 



:^ 



SPEECH. 



The House beinc in tho Cominitlee of the Whole on the 
stiite of the Union — 

Mr. KEITT said: 

Mr. Chairman: On a past occasion I made an 
endeavor, and did not, I trust, entirely fail, to 
prove that, with the diffusion of the human race 
upon earth, in the customs of savage hordes and 
the legislation of early nations— at the origins of 
human societies and under tiie precepts of God, 
directly revealed to his people, slavery, domestic 
slavery, stood as a constant, primitive, and univer- 
sal fact, before which the speculations of schools, 
the reluctance of prejudice, or the whine of hy- 
pocrisy are compelled to sink into either silence 
or acknowledgment, i have appealed, to the ear- 
liest traditions of mankind; I have gone under the 
tent of the patriarch, when he spoke face to face 
" with the Lord out of Heaven," and received 
the promises of the first covenant; I have entered 
the precinct of the household which contained the 
father of the family and the master of the bond- 
man merged in one and the same person; I have 
questioned the usages of nomadic tribes and the 
legislation of civilized States — nay, I have inter- 
rogated the sanctioner of all earthly legislation; 
I have, not irreverently, interrogated the law of 
God himself, and each and all of them have armed 
«iy postulate with defiant proof that slavery, far 
from being the work of violence and of wrong, is 
alike ratified by Divine wisdom and demanded by 
social requirements. 

This, 1 repeat it, the traditional voices of man- 
kind; the usages of the patriarchal days; the cy- 
cles of popular poetry; the enactments of man; 
and the higher sanctions of the law of God — all 
of them amply, unerringly, and irreversibly con- 
verge to establish. 

It does not belong to me, sir, to inquire how 
those who have foregone the manlier attitude of 
the antagonist to skulk under the more conge- 
nial infamies of the traducer, can ever succeed in 
scaling this battlement of proof. For my part, 
aside from ail human authority and legal defense, 
I am content impregnaljly to intrench the rights 



of the South behind the muniments which the 
hand of the Almighty has reared; or, if for 
greater security, to plant them upon the summit 
of the mount where the law was proclaimed; 
where, with the proclamation of the law was also 
uttered the fiat which sanctioned slavery and 
settled the relations between the master and the 
slave. And here, sir, I cannot, in this connection, 
omit reference to a fact which struck me with pe- 
culiar force, in the sequel of my inquiries. It is 
a strange thing, yet no«Iess true than strange, 
that in this consecration of the Divine will, the 
commandme/)ts themselves, given in the voice of 
the thunder and the flash of the lightning; those 
commandments which recognized and confirmed 
the previously existing rights (Exodus, chapter 
XX., verses 10-17) should, without any interpo- 
sition of other matter, be immediately followed 
by precepts settling and regulating the character 
and status of slavery. (Exodus, chapter xxi., 
verses 2, 4, 6, 7, 20, 26, 27, 32.) Yes, turn to 
that Book, which, in all the things of human life, 
is one of perpetual relevancy, because it is the 
Book of eternal wisdom and truth, and any think- 
ing and honest man must also be struck with this 
peculiarity in this question of slavery, which the 
Almighty, in his decrees, has seen fit to conse- 
crate; but which some of his miserable, pre- 
sumptuous creatures, in their superior wisdom 
and holier claims, would damn into an abomina- 
tion and a sin. As in our organic law its crea- 
tors, after the declaration of the objects and 
principles of government, gave the most promi- 
nent place to the duties and inhibitions — marked 
in aspecificform forthe framers, the expounders, 
and the executives of the supreme law; so in the 
Divine constitution, after the declaration of the 
moral law and the requirements of the Divine 
worship, out of the multiplicity of precepts which- 
he had to impose, and which he did impose upon 
his people, God seems specially to have selected 
this question of slavery to make it the subject of 
a particular determination of duties and delega- 
tion of powers, enjoined and conferred' on Mose?>. 
the organ and exponent of His law.. 



That law, Mr. Chairman, endured in its ful- | 
ness, as the expressed will of the Maker, until it 
pleased liim again to reveal thai will to His crca- | 
tures and to send His Messiah as the witness of; 
tliat revelation. It remained in vigor, unmodified [ 
and unchanged, save in the necessities of the new [ 
scheme, among which slavery was not reckoned, j 
by Him who emphatically declared: "lam not | 
come to destroy, but to fulfill " the law, which He , 
committed to His ministers in their prosecution 
of His divine niis.sion By them it wa.s transmit- 
ted to their successors, and by these, in an un- 
broken line, to the succeeding agents who con- 
tinued that work. And thus, sir, down the steep 
of ages, until our days of new lights and modern 
improvements, when it is sought to substitute a 
sickly philanthropy for the salutary precepts of 
the Creator — our days of fanatical innovation and 
dissolving doctrines, in which the voice of the 
Romillies, the Wilberforces, and the Clarksons, 
denouncing the law of God, found an echo in our 
own second-handed Abolition conferences, in our 
modest revisers of the old(;n creed, and northern 
editors of a new code of Christianity. From ne- 
gation to negation they have gone on repudiating 
the traditions of the original code; repudiating tiie 
customs of the past which it sanctioned; repudi- 
ating tlie formal instructions of the earliest apos- 
tles; repudiating, when they did not actually 
criminate, the silence of the Savior himself; they 
have gone on thus, until, in one crowning act of 
impious insolence, howlinir for "an anti-slavery 
Bible and an anti-slavery God," they have repu- 
diated the written law of the divine Legislator, 
and ea- cathedra declared His own institution and 
consecration of slavery to be a defilement and a 
crime. If we, sir, who claim a two-fold guarantee 
for the rights of the slaveholder, in tiie legal sanc- 
tion and the divine injunctions, which I take to be 
the very duramen of the institution and itsgrowth, 
are tainted by such defilement and guilty of such 
crime; if these men, instead of being impious ma- 
niacs and malicious slanderers, are the assertors 
of truth and the vindicators of right; then shall we 
have to reverse the injunctions of the apostles de- 
livered in the prosecution of their ministry and 
baptized in the holy spirit of knowledge and truth ; 
shall have to load our souls witii the guilt of the 
blasphemerand condemn the Savior for His silence 
on this question of slavey, orinterpolate His leach- 
ingsdispensed to those apostles as the muniments 
of their approaching ministry. Then, sir, shall 
we liecompullfd to rend asunder the slavery record 
of Exodus, exiendin^ over the chapters of Levi- 
ticus, and reaffirmed in the second jjromulgation 
of tlie law throuj;h the precepts of Deuteronomy. 
Compelled, sir, if tiiese men are to escape the 
stigma whicli should attach to them as willful 
falsifii rs of the word of God, to pervert every line 
of 8cri|)ture, and blot out the decalogue itself; 
whicii, emijodying ilie sum of our moral duties 
and religious obligations, embodies also a recog- 
nition oi' blavery. 

Hut we of the South, wiili no claim to self-sus- 
taining godliness, and wiili no impudent preten- 
sions tu refiM'm or amend the word ofGoUjUuist 
be content to abide by its precepts, and cling to 



its securities. We cannot, therefore, consent that 
it shall be so lacerated as to pluck away from its 
prohibitions, not a denunciation of slavery, but 
that command which should forbid men " to bear 
false witness against their neighbor." Hence, 
sir, respecting that law, in all its bearings, we re- 
spect it in its bearing upon slavery, where its rec- 
ognition by man is corroborated by the sanction 
of Heaven. It has the authority of covenant and 
time for its applications in human societies. It 
has the authority of apostolic instructions, and of 
Christian practice. !t has the authority of the can- 
ons and decretals of the Church, when there was 
but one Church on the face of the earth. It has the 
authority of imperial rescripts and royal decrees, 
notcondemnedby the spiritual dicta of the Church. 
It has the authority of parliamentary statutes, of 
colonial regulations and State laws, which recog- 
nize its concordance and fitness with slavery. 
Slavery, sir, under that law, has claimed and ob- 
tained the assent of universal custom and right; 
and we contend that a (Z(si?Ueres/c(h'enunciation, or 
■jnous non-user of a right, on the part of any in- 
dividiial, community, or State, can never dispar- 
age the autliority of that law, affect the sanctity 
of our rights, or pervert their exercise into an im- 
putation of wrong. No, .sir; we cannot allow 
those men, unmasked and unrebuked, to mutilate 
the record for purposes of malice, of falsehood, 
and of strife. The municipal law of modern times 
is but the binomial affirmation of the Divine law 
ofancieni days; and upon both we stand, and shall 
ever stand, as a tower of impregnable strength. 

Painfully aware am I, Mr. Chairman, that this 
is not the place where the question of slavery, in 
this view — I mean in the religious view — should 
be discussed. But when the assault is not con- 
fined to the declarations of conferences, awd the 
decreesof synods; to the rabid vituperations of the 
rostra, and the scurrilous amenities of the pulpit; 
when the trained and prompted retailers of secu- 
lar slanders and holy falsehoods come here, where 
all meet ufion an equality of political rights, what- 
ever distinction may be marked by a sense of per- 
sonal dignity, and the despotism of gentlemanly 
nurture — come here, and upon this floor, " like 
hounds let loose from leash," day after day howl 
in our ears that we are " men stealers;" that we 
are breakers of the Divine law; that slavery has 
the curse of God upon its head; and that our 
maintenance of the system is a sin in His eyes; 
we may be pardoned for overlooking the propri- 
eties of place, and even " wer 't in a churcli," not 
retrain from repelling the assault where it is made, 
and the falsehood where advanced. Why, sir, 
even those who profess to stand by our rights 
modify the admission by tlie salvo that slavery, 
though a shocking thing, is our own business and 
concL-rn. They justify their gingerly advocacy 
of what they call the rights of slavery, as existing 
in the States, by the com[dimenlary avowal that 
" our people are not tlieir people, and our God 
their God." That our people and our God are 
not tlieir people and their God, \\k have abundant 
and satisfactory proof. 'I'lie burning sense of 
wrong that kindlts the southern heart; every 
pulse which, in the southern bosom, beats in an- 



swer to the voice of justice, tells us that our people | 
cannot be their people. That their God is not, 
and cannot be our God; we have the evidence in 
their persistent repudiation of His law, and their 
willful perveraion of its precepts. 

For the delicate allotment in the former case, 
of the sui'.m cuique, Mr. Chairman, and the proper 
discrimination betweenourpeople and theirs, they 
have the due acknowledgments of one, at least, 
who would regret to find misconception or con- 
fusion existing on that score. For the duality of 
the godship, in the latter instance, I am not other- 
wise prepared, nor is it quite my province to ac- 
count. I am, however, reminded of the congrat- 
ulations of the Roman poet: 

"O! saii'-tas sentes. quibiis Ii.t?c nascuiitur, in hortis 
Numiiia" — 
congratulations addressed to " that holy race 
whose gods in gardens grovv';" whilst mine may 
not be withheld from the people, not ours, whose 
inventive genius, among others of its achieve- 
ments, has secured for them a patent northern 
god, in a Yankee heaven. I am satisfied, sir, to 
give wide berth to this horrid idol of northern 
contrivance — horrid indeed , sir, if we are to judge 
of its character by the madness and impiety to 
which its baleful spirit is driving its fanatical 
worshipers. I give it wide berth to cling to the 
God whom we acknowledge in reverence and 
truth — the God of our fathers, who has smiled, 
and who continues to smile, in kindness and pro- 
lection, upon both master and slave; the God of 
ourfathers in the trial times of our struggle, whose 
light they invoked in the deliberations of the coun- 
cil-room, and to whose might they appealed in 
the arbitrament of the battle-field: the God who 
breathed wisdom in their councils, and gave 
power to their arms; the God who, in the day of 
ordeal, with tlie scales of justice in His hand, 
swayed the beam on the side of victory and right. 
This, sir, is our God — t!ie God whose paths we 
have striven to pursue, and wliose mandates we 
have labored to obey. This God, the very broth- 
erly spirit of our northern friend^ has differenced 
from theirs. 

In the prosecution of this duty to the South, 
and in vindication of its tiaduced and slandered 
people, to Him and to His law, its permission 
and its guarantees, I confidently appeal to shake 
off the responsibility which the repeated asser- 
tion that slavery is a sin, because it is an assumed 
■violation of the justice of God, seeks to iinpute 
to us as breakers of the Christain law in the main- 
tenance of the institution in our political and do- 
mestic society. Why, sir, the news current upon 
your streets but yesterday tells you that a reli- 
gious conference — a religious conference! — at the 
North, following scores of other conferences of 
the kind, by a vote of fit'ty-one against thirty-five, 
passed resolutions — affirmed resolutions, decree- 
ing us and our people of the South to be violators 
of the law of God, and of the teachings of His 
Son. The duties of the headsman, performed on 
some of the more distinguished felons, were wont, 
in times past, to borrow a relative dignity from the 
character of the criminals. But the office of an ex- 
ecutioner, d ischarged even on these saintly culprits 



of ours, can be but loathsome at best. Hence, sir, 
I shrink from branding these pious perverters of 
truth with the stigma due to the falsehoods which 
they, with fiendish malice and unstinted breath, 
daily drivel against the institutions, the morals, 
and the religion of the South. Were it not for the 
obligation incumbent on this discussion to pluck 
the mask from the face of error, and to champion 
the sanctities of truth, I would scarcely waste the 
breath to ask them to point out to us where Christ 
tauEfht, where Christ hinted, that slavery, as He 
found it established by the will of His Father, ut- 
tered on the heights of Sinai — that slavery, as He 
found it. under the derivative authority of human 
legislation, is a violation and a breaking of His 
Divine precepts? Hurnbly and reverently, sir, 
have I scanned those precepts; not to falsify, not to ' 
warp, but to understand and respect; and nowhere 
yet have I been able to find a line that will either 
screen our slanderers from the guilt of willful ob- 
liquity from the paths, which, in this respect. He 
has marked for our feet, or subjectusto the charge 
of a departure from His intents in the same re- 
spect. It is our sincere acknowledgment, on the 
contrary', that His teachings, without conceit of 
ourselves, or disparagement of others, are a guide 
to our lives, and a sacrament to our hopes; and 
we keep them guarded and free from the thousand 
worldly stains by which, through their prostitu- 
tion of religion to political and secular ends, our 
traducers blur the holiness and deform the beauty 
of His worship, in persistent contempt of His ad- 
monition: " My kingdom is not of this world." 

Much as the fact may exercise the incredulity 
of our northern friends — credulous in all else that 
promises full scope for the pursuit of serious fol- 
lies and fanatical aims — I assert this, in the name 
of a high-thoughted and generous people, whose 
only guilt is blindness to the refined civilization, 
and rebellion against the self-seeking morality of 
a self-righteous North. I do it in the name and 
on behalf of the mothers of the South, before the 
moral splendors of whose home-virtues and ex- 
emplary lives the fame of the Roman matrons 
dwindles into an empty boast. I assert it in the 
name and on behalf of the daughters of the South, 
who, rich in every endowment that adorns the fe- 
male character, ffive assurance that this patrimony 
of quiet and purifying virtues shall long continue 
unflawed by the rude contact of the public ros- 
trum, or unshamed by dabblings in the vagaries 
of woman's rights. I assert it in the name of the 
younger sons of the South, the spes altera Ronu^, 
the future hope of our Republic, held to the mem- 
ory of lofty deeds, and sworn to patriotic service. 
But, especially do I assert it in the nanrie and in 
vindication of a pure and enlightened clergy, who 
sustain high purposes v/ith high dignity, and jus- 
tify their ministry by the teachings which their 
Master taught. 

When, therefore, Mr. Chairman, the attempt 
is made, in the name of religion, to put our moral 
and social character under the ban of the world's 
opinion; when made by the arm of fanaticism, 
led by falsehood, to assail the institutions and en- 
danger the peace of the South; it is neither out of 
place, nor against propriety, for us to go even to 



6 



the armories of Christianity for a weapon of de- 
fense. I trust, sir, that the same s)jirit of fairness 
which sustained my reference to the primitive 
sources of unerring; wisdom and truth, and guided 
the investigation into the other sources of author- 
ity, will not fail me in further inquiries directed 
to the record of the gospel, which time has 
handed down to us as the voucher of the doctrines 
of Christ. 

On his advent, sir, slavery was a universal fact, 
growing out of the rights laid down in the ori- 
ginal law, and acknowledged by every tribe and 
nation, whether now lost in the darkness of ages, 
or once figuring in tlie geographies of the inhab- 
ited earth. Neither He, as the promulger of the 
suppletory lav/, nor His Apostles, as its subse- 
quent heralds, ever denied the law in that partic- 
ular, or preached in condemnation of either the 
right or the fact. The founder of the new code 
taught the unity of God in a trinity of persons. 
Fie taught the fall of man and the regeneration 
through His merits. He enforced the necessities 
of meekness, justice, temperance, and charity. 
He rebuked the pride of human will and of hu- 
man intellect, and sustained all orders of men by 
the doctrine that the highest of the spiritual vir- 
tues can be linked with a lowly estate, a chastened 
■will, and a trusting faith. From the summit of 
that mount, to which every sincere Christian looks 
for the law of his duty. He, in minutest details, 
uttered all the offices of those who claim to be the 
followers of His gospel; but in nothing, save the 
redemption of marriage from the bond of the Mo- 
saic law, and in its consecration under a holier 
form, did lie enjoin any innovation in the social 
scheme. He provided ample means for the eman- 
cipation of His creatuies from the spiritual bond- 
age; but nowhere did He proclaim the abolition of 
legal or domestic slavery. He drew closer the 
family tie — stripped the husband of much of his 
irresponsible authority, and raised woman up in 
the scale of social influence. He inculcated good 
works on all — each in his degree, and enjoined 
purity of life and respect for the paternal author- 
ity and the conjugal bond. This, and more. He 
has left to us as memorials of a mission still spread- 
ing througii the civilized and uncivilized world. 
But i ask to be pointed to the record, where He 
gave one word of mandate, where He uttered one 
syllable of reprobation regarding the relations of 
niasierand slave; relations recognized by the Gov- 
ernment under which His gospel and its precepts 
were dispensed. It is, on the contraryj a singular 
and noteworthy fact that He universally abstained 
from any reproving allusion to them. He talked 
to tlie doctors and of the doctors, never loath to 
wrest the law to their own purposes, whether clad 
in the "Jewish gabardiiu-," or the New England 
cloak. He talked to Pharisees, and of the Phar- 
isees, whose self-righteousness has lost no pre- 
sumption by grafting on the Puritan stock. He 
talked to hypocrites, and of hypocrites, whose 
unbroken lineage has run through time, and con- 
quered space from the shores of Genesareth to 
the base of Plymouth rock. But 1 call for the 
allegation of a single instance, when, in the midst 
of Galilee, a conquered Jewisii province, ruled by 



a Roman procurator, with slavery existing under 
the Mosaic law, and slavery existing under the 
heathen law, He once spoke to slaves or against 
slavery. I find, on the other hand, that, on His 
entrance into Capernaum, He heals the slave of 
the centurion, and has no rebuke for slavery, but 
praises for the officer's faith.* 

No, sir, nothing of condemnation, nothing of 
even reproof from the Savior's lips, for the " vile 
wretch," — the " man stealer;" who, according to 
the approved Yankee formula, " held his brother 
man in bondage." If ever, Mr. Chairman, an 
opportunity was offered to stamp with reproba- 
tion this lately devised curse and ungodliness of 
slavery, surely this healing of the centurion's 
slave held outthat mostgolden opportunity. Had 
one of our pious go-betweens — one of our reli- 
gious brokers here upon earth — but stood next 
to the Savior, and found the chance of whisper- 
ing his puritanic suggestion, well might He have 
said to the Roman officer: " You profess that this 
slave is ' endeared to you,' and yet you keep him 
in bondage against my Father's law and mine. 
You have appealed to the power which He gave 
to me to raise him up from his bed of palsy, and 
I have raised him up without money and without 
price; will you not alike evince your acknowl- 
edgment of my ministry, and your affection for 
I your slave, and restore him to that freedom, of 
j which you deprive him, in defiance of nature, of 
1 man, and of God ?" No, sir; wrapped in His 
! own imperscrutable knowledge of all things — un- 
aided even by the lights of our modern improvers 
— not a word of rebuke, not one of remonstrance, 
passes His divine lips; but instead, come the 
words of eulogy, that set up the soldier as a pat- 
tern for Israel, whilst the right of the master and 
the protection of the slave are sanctioned in the 
' faith of the believer. It is vain for these godly 
exj)Ounders of ours to speculate upon ignorance, 
or rely on fanaticism to distort the teachings of 
Christ to the support of theirinterested, malicious, 
and selfish crusade against an institution devised 
by the will of God, and accepted by the law of 
man. In the words of the Pitelor, sir, non ita 
scrlptum legis carmen — this is not the sacramental 
language of either the divine law, or of Him who 
expounded its precepts. In the multitude of sub- 
jects upon which He discoursed with His disci- 
ples, you find no mention of slavery; in matters 
upon which He gave them instructions and cliarge, 
never did He breath the name of slave except in 
the frequent use which He makes of the relations 
between master and slave to illustrate those be- 
tween God and his creatures. 

I therefore challenge our detractors to point 
out to us where Pie condemned slavery, or de- 
! nounced the master who owned the slave. In 

* Once, for all, tlie fact is meiuionpd that, in Greek, 
avSpdrroSov is a slave by captivity in wiir ; Sjv\oi, a slave 
by birth ; Oepaviov, a seiviuit, a Yankee " help ;" oinirrn, 
ailonit'stic. whether nifuial or servile ; and lastly ^^a^)l^>T6i, 
one that serves lor wajjes or pay. The word •• servant," 
as a version of^oOAoj, in King James's translation, is a le- 

j tlneinent of language; for iov\oi means'' slave," and noth- 

1' ing but slave, so born. 



what passage of His conferences with his disci- 
ples? In what line of His preachings to tiiemul- j 
titudes? In what word of His mandates to His ! 
Apostles, and in what last injunction, when He ' 
laid in their hands the destinies, not only of the j 
world, but the destinies of the hereafter also of ; 
that world? On the contrary, sir, you find Him 
recognizing all the obligations of the social scheme 
in the midst of which'He lived and moved; and 
teaching all of them, down to the payment of 
tribute to Cresar, recurring even to His power of i 
miracle to provide the means of its payment. He i 
recognizes all the subordinations of political life, ! 
and among these he specially recognizes the sub- 
jection of the slave to the master, when, warning 
His followers of the duty of faith in Him, He j 
expressly inforces His admonition by the dictum 
that" the disciple is not above his teacher, nor the 
slave (it is Sov\os in the original text) above his 
master." In his foresight of the influence of His 
mission on all the relations of heathen life, He i 
tells His disciples that He has come to set the j 
father against the son, the daughter against the j 
mother, the friend against the friend. But I no- 
where find that He told them that he had come 
to overthrow the standing order of things, that i 
He had come to stir the untutored passions of j 
the slave, to break the tie that bound him to his 
master, and to set him up against his lawful au- 
thority. In that divine foresight of the dissen- [ 
sions which the adoption of His creed by some, 
and its rejection by others, would introduce in 
the family and the State, He told his disciples He 
had come to bring, not peace but the sword. 
But, sir, I am yet to find that He ever commended 
that sword to the hand of the slave, with the in- 
vitation — nay, with the injunction — to sheath it i 
in the master's throat. If there be a record of it, 
it must be in some precepts of the " anti-slavery | 
God," and written down in some edition of the j 
"anti-slavery Bible," which northern fanatics 
have created for their rule of faith. To the chap- 
ters of that Bible of intrusive, meddlesome, and 
ever dissatisfied contrivers of isms, was reserved 
the high privilege of correcting the laches of the 
Savior, and of putting, in His holy name, the 
torch and the knife in the hands of our slaves — 
pointing the former to our roofs, and the latter to 
our throats. 

Well, sir, if the Savior did not reprove, nay, 
did not even mention legal or domestic slavery; 
if He left no instructions and no charge to His 
disciples touching either its abolition or its sin- 
fulness, let us see whether those disciples did not, 
upon the organization of the visible Church, and 
its entwining with the offices of a new form of 
society, either from their own authority, or from 
that of their Master, denounce the institution. 
Open the book of eternal truth, and you will find 
that in His teachings He never went beyond the 
race of Abraham. 

To them the promise had been made, and to 
them He came in its fulfillment. When, therefore. 
He had revealed himself in the form of human- 
ity; when He had forced upon them the testimony 
of His mission, and of His power, by a con- 
cordance with prophecy, and by His working of 



I miracles; when, in the prospect of His death, 
which He knew to be impending, He gave the 
j last of His charges to His immediate followers; 
among them was the injunction to preach the 
! Gospel to all the nations of the earth. In the dis- 
j charge of their duty, that Gospel they did preach, 
I and preached it as its precepts had been orally 
! delivered to them. If, then, in His mandates 
j He had enjoined them against slavery, or if, by 
; virtue of some grant of power not recorded, and 
] which might have been made to them, they had 
I found anything contrary to His instructions and 
His charge, in the fact and usage of slavery, un- 
I questionably would they have recorded the fact in 
' His gospel of truth; unquestionably would they 
I have raised their voice against the continuance of 
the institution, though they knew God Himself to 
have been its founder; and, warning a slave not 
' to obey a master who had neither religious nor 
j legal right over him, unquestionably would they 
! have rebuked, or rather condemned the master, 
not merely for claiming obedience, but for hold- 
ing his "brother man "in that condition which de- 
manded subservience. Now,sir,wefind nothingof 
the kind. As their Master had abstained in the case 
of the centurion, so they abstained in the general 
fact of relation between master and slave. Against 
this no contrivance of malice and no refinement of 
sophistry can avail. The Savior taught for a pe- 
riod of nearly three years, and of these teachings 
He left no record written Joy Himself. The ta§k 
of embodying them in what we now know as the 
canon of the New Testament, devolved upon His 
ministers. As they received, so must they have 
handed down to us. But, sir, nowhere will you 
find slavery mentioned by them as an abomina- 
tion and a sin. They have not so handed it down 
to us; they therefore did not thus receive it from 
the Savior's lips. But if not thus laid down, 
either from the oral declarations of the Savior or 
the written record of His words, slavery cannot, 
therefore, without perversion, be called an abom- 
ination and a sin. And yet we are seriously told, 
within the last three weeks we have heard it sanc- 
timoniously repeated, that slavery is a damning 
sin against the Divine law; a hot-bed of corrup- 
tion, tainting everything within its atmosphere; 
everything, even to the most sacred relations of 
the domesticcircle. Whence, would I ask, do those 
kind men of the North, who are not touched by 
the blight or cursed by the sin of slavery, derive 
their peculiar contributions to the stock of mor- 
ality? From what quarter of this Confederacy, 
under wl^t state of morals, come those daily and 
hourly revelations of crime which appal the coun- 
try, and blur its history with the darkest record 
of social corruption and social guilt? Why, sir, 
from the pure, saintly, and immaculate region.s 
of the land not tainted by this abomination of 
I slavery ! There the most complicated theory of 
crime finds the meet representative, often the ready 
agent to carry it into practice; and this not in the 
sentina Reipublicx; not in the drains and sewer.^t 
which bubble with immorality and vice, but in 
the high places of society, where the corruption 
; and the vice — not begotten by our curse of sla- 
very, nor induced by the influence of its blight—' 



8 



move and live unpunished and unchecked. It 
were barely doing justice to the better claims of 
our section to institute comparison between the 
morality of the South and North. The very slaves 
whom they hold up to us as reacting causes of cor- 
raption, in retribution of tlie condition in which 
the law of man and of God has placed them, might 
wellctuillenge comparison with any laboring- class, 
nor shrink from their standard, whether in the 
moral or religious scale. 

The old law, sir, admitted the slave to a parti- 
cipation in the rites of the Jewish temple, but it 
did not relieve him from the obligation of bond- 
age which it had itself imposed. Our usage, ac- 
cepting the law that institutes the slave, allows 
him to benefit by all the dispensations of the 
Christian Church. The initiatory rite which was 
administered to him in the peculiar form of the 
Jewish creed, is now administered to him in the 
waters of baptism, which is the Christian substi- 
tute for the Hebrew " sign. " The partaking by 
him of the ordinance of the Passover, which was 
the great Jewish remembrancer, is among us ex- 
tended to him in the Christian communion which 
supplanted the Jewish type. In one word, and 
for all that our systematic traducers may utter in 
falsehood, the marriage rite is free to the race, 
wherevertheirinclination or choice may tend. In- 
deed, sir, I do not know, that, even among our 
blacks, the bond is not held in greater sacredness 
than it has of late seemed to be among their bet- 
ters at the North; for, unless I greatly err, the 
dockets of more than one free State bear witness 
to the zeal with which some, at least, of our white 
reverend friends practically comment the precept, 
" Whom God hath joined, let no man put asun- 
der." My high regard for the virtues of the sex 
forbids the supposition that the wives of our meek 
and charitable parsons can justify applications to 
courts of justice for human decrees to reverse the 
Divine injunction, and make twain what marriage 
has made " one flesh." I am compelled, there- 
fore, to think that, useful as these reverend lords 
may be to foster domestic agitation and kindle 
civil feuds, they would be but sorry, if not dan- 
gerous exemplars, in this respect, for the morality 
of our black preachers, for «uch we have among 
us, wiioare not yet trained to dexterous evasions 
of the moral precepts. 

But, sir, n crimination is not within the scope 
of my remarks; and I resume my vindication of 
the fact and right of slavery on purely religious 
grounds, and under purely religious authority. I 
have laid down, sir, that neither from the decla- 
rations of the Master, nor from the teethings of 
the apostles, can slavery, without perversion of 
both, be called an abomination and a sin. That 
it is not an abomination is an inconcussible fact, 
because it was ir).stituted by the Almighty Him- 
self, and the institution has remaiiiccl unrepealed; 
that it is not a sin is equally unshaken, because 
it has been sanctioned by the silence of the Sa- 
vior, and recognized by His apostles, speaking in 
His name. I find them in their own record of 
their acts holding a first council of the Church; I 
Hec iliem, by virtue of the power received from 
; heir Head , engaged in debates, and making decis- 



ions in matters of faith ; I see them, among other 
acts, after solemn deliberations, repudiating the 
tenth verse of the seventeenth chapter of Genesis; 
and this, on essential grounds, because the bap- 
tism of water was one of those perfections of the 
law substituted for the baptism of blood. But in 
that council, in those acts, I see no reversal, no 
mention even, of the forty-sixth verse of the 
twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, which, in the 
words of God, and with the sanction of His will, 
makes slavery " a perpetual inheritance" by the 
precept of a law which the Messiah came to fulfill, 
not destroy. I go further, and I find that, of the 
apostles, some, in the discharge of their minis- 
try, confined it to their immediate neighborhood, 
whilst others traveled into remoter lands in pros- 
ecution of their missionary task. Among the lat- 
ter, Paul was the most zealous and active. Bearing 
the word to the inhabitants of many provinces, 
in various countries, he had found them pagans, 
and he left them Christians in practice and faith. 
Deeply versed in the law of the covenant, divine- 
ly inspired with the spirit of the gospel, not un- 
acquainted with the precepts of the code, he had 
occasion, in his missions, to approach and decide 
many of the most intricate questions growing 
out of the doctrines of the new creed, and the in- 
stitutes of political society. The conditions of 
Christianity, embraced by a wife and repudiated 
by a husband, adopted by a mother and refused 
by the children, preached to a slave and rejected 
by the master, suggested new ideas, and startled 
many scruples in many a mind. 

Hence, sir, we find that after he had left them, 
to pass on to other theaters of action, he is fre- 
quently appealed to on some of the most delicate 
of domestic questions — among them, this very 
one of slavery — arising between individuals, who, 
bound together by the civil law of the land, were 
severed by religious differences of faith. Well, sir, 
what lesson does his example supply to the inno- 
vators of our holier days? In all cases, with the 
clearness and precision, which, had he not been 
an inspired agent, would have marked him as one 
of the proudest of human intellects, he explains 
and resolves; he exhorts and enjoins; he permits 
and forbids. But in no instance on the question 
of slavery, does he utter one reproving word. As 
his Master had neither cotidemnod nor rebuked, 
so he abstains from condemnation and rebuke. 
As his Master had not disclaimed, so he does 
not breathe a word against Jewish slavery, con- 
secrated by the law of God; not a word against 
pagan slavery, sanctioned by the law of the Code. 
The doctrine of the Code, sir, on a past occasion, 
I fully, and 1 trust unanswerably, explained. The 
doctrine of the Go.spel, as delivered by the Savior, 
on this subject, I think that 1 have as fully and as 
unanswerably explained. But, besides the em- 
bodiments of precepts in the Gospel, the apostles 
have left us, in the shape of acts, a record of their- 
ministerial functions, and under the form of epis- 
tles, a transcript of their pastoral instructions to 
the flocks* which they had gathered in the vari- 
ous provinces of earth. In those instructions is 
embraced every variety of questions, social and 
domestic, which could arise in political societies, 



infinitely less ramified and complicated than are 
our systems of polity. To these instructions, 
therefore, I now proceed to appeal. A reference 
to the first apostolic council, consigned in the 
history of the Acts, shows that though various 
questions of political life had been touched upon, 
that of slavery did not enter into debate. For 
such a discussion, sir, the time had, no doubt, not 
yet come. But it did come, and come teeming 
with inquiries suggested by the conscience, or 
urged by the faith of the new converts. Among 
those was this mysterious question of slavery, 
the solution of which baffles the most subtile in- 
genuities of man, for the very reason, perchance, 
that it is not of his creation and his establishment. 
Well, sir, the question came up, and what does 
the record show.' Why, they go to the record of 
that loord which shall not pass away; they scru- 
tinize the rights which it allows; the duties which 
it presc'ioes; the obligations which it imposes, 
and instantly the question is settled in the mind 
of the Apostle, and the adjustment is uttered, un- 
der the spirit of the Divine Master himself. "Ser- 
vants, (^ot)Xo(, slaves,) beobedientto them thatai-e 
your masters, according to the flesh , with fear and 
trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto 
Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, 
but as the servants of Christ, doing the ivill of 
God." (Ephesians,chap. vi., verseS.) And here, 
sir, will you notice that the inducement, nay, the 
reason for the obedience of the slave, is, that it 
is " doing the will of God .'" How else could it 
be, sir.' How else, that the Divine spirit should 
breathe the words of Divine truth .' Had not the 
will of God been expressed in the original law.' 
Had not that original law established and regu- 
lated the conditions of slavery .' Had not those 
conditions been carried out and maintained , when 
the Savior came with the supplemental law.' 
* Had not the Savior, when he proclaimed that 
supplemental law, declared that its object and es- 
sence were " to fulfill— not to destroy .'" Did He 
destroy.' Did He rescind the portion of the ori- 
ginal law which instituted slavery .' No, sir; no! 
Well enough did the Apostle know that He had 
not. That His divine lips had been sealed into si- 
lence as to an institution which His Father, in His 
wisdom, had sanctioned, and which He had not, 
in Hiselernalcouncil,nnissionedHim to abrogate. 
Hence, sir, no hesitation, and no doubt; and un- 
der the inspired pen of the Apostle, the duty and 
the obligation are sheerly defined. " Slaves," 
(I rectify the perversions of King James's trans- 
lators,) "slaves— (JovXoi — be obedient to them that 
are your masters; doing the will of God." 

But this question of slavery, under the dispen- 
sation of the Gospel, was one which touched every 
man at almost every point of his existence. Un- 
like our pragmatic advisers of the North — whose 
forefathers, by a decision of their Supreme Court, 
blundered into an abolition of slavery, and there- 
fore can have but an intrusive concern in this 
question — the Ephesians had slaves in their midst; 
and hence their anxiety to reconcile their mu- 
nicipal rights with their religious obligations. 
But this anxiety was not experienced in Ephesus 
alone. Wherever slavery was found, and the 



master, or the slave, a convert to the new creed, 
these very questions of faith and scruples of con- 
science arose. Hence you find the Colossians, to 
whom the light of the Gospel had been dispensed: 
who claimed the honor of founding one of the 
seven primitive churches in Asia; the depositaries 
of the faith in its earlier purity, also appealing to 
the Apostle on this all-pervading question of sla- 
very, which touched them in their dearest social 
and religious interests. As it was settled for the 
Ephesians, so was it settled for the Colossians. 
Slaves obey,&c. The mandate is^peremptory ; it 
is one of obedience to the master*, and it implies 
bis right to enforce it. It settles, therefore, the 
right of the master in the tenure of the slave, 
within the limitations which the Apostle assigns, 
and which the statutes of the land have, in some 
form, recognized. And here it strikes me that the 
injunction of the Apostle is, that the slave shall 
"bide the ordinance of God" in singleness of 
heart. How long would that condition continue 
to exist, did those who have taken upon them- 
selves the patronage of the temporal and spiritual 
welfare of our slaves possess the power and the 
authority to carry out their very philanthropic 
schemes.' Why, sir, that very "singleness of 
heart," which is the appanage of our slaves, they 
madly, ruthlessly, seek to destroy, or pervert into 
an instrument of baleful malice. They preach re- 
bellion, too, to the slave against the master, whom 
the law and the will of God have placed over him. 
It is well, sir, for the interest as well as the 
character of the South , that the indefeasible Word 
of God has spoken a curse on those who preach 
false gospel, or pervert the precepts of His law. 
Were any further proof needed of such preach- 
ing of the gospel, and such perversion of the law, 
I know not where it can be looked for in its most 
conclusive form, save in the epistles of Paul to his 
favorite disciple. If no other muniment for the. 
rights of the slaveholder but that one could be 
found in the canon of Scripture, that alone were 
amply sufficient to fence them against the assaults 
of either fanatic or hypocrite. There is authority 
from the Apostle of the Gentiles, which commends 
itself with irreversible force and power to the hon- 
esty of such of our northern friends as are honest 
in this question of slavery; and that authority 
speaks unmistakably in his epistles to Timothy. 
They embrace a variety of instructions furnished 
to the missionary in his ministry to the Church 
of Ephesus. Almost every relation of life the 
Apostle draws within the purvievy of his sagacious 
mind, and makes the subject of his pastoral charges 
to the young Levile. Among them are those 
; against the " men-stealers," and that, northern 
comity would apply to us; but among them are 
' those also against " liars," and that, I fear, looks 
unerringly to some of our good brethren of the 
North; but in the whole compages of those in- 
structions and charges, I find not a single one 
against slavery. On the contrary, for fear, it would 
seem, that the epistle which he had addressed di- 
rectly to his flock at Ephesus should have failed 
to enlighten their minds and pacify their con- 
sciences on the question of slavery, the very first 
words of the last chapter of the former epistle 



10 



show who are the " men-stealers" and who the 
" liars;" wliether we, who hold our slaves under 
the very tenure of God 's will , or they who would 
lie away the law and the Gospel, which bear 
witness to that will. 

Listen, sir, to the doctrine which the Apostle 
delivers to Timothy, to teach and proclaim: "Let 
as many servants (JouAoi, slaves) as are under the 
yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, 
that the name of God and His doctrines be not 
blasphemed." — (1 Timothy, chap, vi., verse 1.) 
I do not profess to be mucii versed in the knowl- 
edge of exegesis; but if it could ever easily be 
applied to the meaning of words, it must surely 
be in this instance of a text which can leave no 
loop-hole for either quibble or doubt. The very 
form of the mandate of the Apostle is one of great 
peculiarity. He not merely tells the slave, in 
another place, that the master has a right to his 
obedience; but he also charges Timothy, his vicar 
at Ephesus, to teach and proclaim that the mas- 
ter is entitled to honor at the hands of the slave. 
The very words (idiovg SsoTora;, their o!c?i masters) 
seem to convey a peculiar import. The slave, as 
such, is bound to obey him under whose author- 
ity he may accidentally be placed. But to his 
own master, his master whose " perpetual inher- 
itance" he is, he owes the tribute of honor as well 
as the duty of obedience; and this for the reason 
assigned by the Apostle, that the master is to be 
counted worthy of such tribute. Now, sir, I ask, 
unless words so plainly put together can by any 
possibility lead the mind astray, whether any man 
can for a moment reasonably admit that that is 
abominable, that that is sinful, which the Apos- 
tle, speaking under the influence of the Holy 
Spirit, charges his disciple to teach and proclaim 
as worthy of honor in the master's person.' But 
why should I gloss a text, the words of which 
;3peak most eloquently for themselves.' 

Read the text over, and see whether it be pos- 
sible for any one to mistake its import and force. 
The slave, under the yoke of bondage, is bound 
— not through compulsion, but " in singleness of 
heart" — to obey his master in the flesh. He is 
bound not only to obey, but also to honor his 
master, who is accounted worthy of the honor! 
And why, sir.' Lest a contrary conduct, on the 
part of the slave, shall do violence to the teach- 
ings of the Savior, and blaspheme the name of 
God ! Now, who are the perpetrators of sin, and 
the workers of iniquity? We, who look to the 
name of God and to His law, for our rights, and 
abide by tin; teachings which the Muster taught.' 
Ortliey,who by insolent repudiations blaspheme 
His name, and by false assumption, pervert His 
doctrines.' Let the text answer for the South. 
To those very conscientious deniers of the olden 
law, who strive to quibble out of its precepts and 
abjure its institution of slavery, on the plea that 
it IS effete, 1 would coinmiiid the Epistle of Paul 
to the Galatians, in which it is written: "Cursed 
is every one that continucth not in all things 
which are written in the book of the law to do 
them." — (Chapter iii., verse 11). ) Toothers, our 
excellent anienders of the new dispensation, who 
would foist the sin of slavery in tne Gospel-law, 



I would equally submit the gentle warnings given 
to their predecessors, the "foolish Galatians:" 
" If any man preach any other Gospel unto you 
than that ye have received , let him be accursed ! ' ' 

Indeed, sir, 1 wish our kind friends joy of the 
pleasant position in which their regard for the 
welfare, the morality, and the godliness of the 
South, has placed them before the world. I see 
them, in the self-seeking of their pride and the 
perversity of their heart, contrive false and anti- 
Christian doctrines to delude ignorance and prop- 
agate mischief. In their crusade against the sla- 
very institution of the South, I see them, like 
their compeers, the Galatians, compelled to face 
the twofold horns of the scriptural dilemma. 
They would discard, in their call for an " anti- 
slavery Bible," the dispensation of the old law, 
which, in the word of God, establishes and sanc- 
tions the tenure of slaves as a " perpetual inher- 
itance;" and the tenth verse of the epistle peals 
into their ears: " Cursed is every one that con- 
tinueth not in all things which are written in the 
book of the law to do them." They would sup- 
ply the silence of the Savior, or interpolate His 
gospel, when they clainor that it condemns sla- 
very; and the ninth verse of the first chapter of 
the same epistle again meets them'with the threat 
of God's wrath: " If any man preach any other 
Gospel unto you than that ye have received, let 
him be accursed !" 

And here, Mr. Chairman, I protest against any 
misapplication of my remarks, so as to involve in 
them the whole body of the clergy of the free 
States. I am free to acknowledge, sir, that they 
number among their ranks men of whom, either 
as scholars or divines, any country might justly 
be proud; men to whose sterling piety and faith- 
ful pastorates not even the duty which I owe to a 
slandered and long-enduring people could induce 
me to do injustice or to deny the praise. I trust, 
therefore, that these remarks shall not be misun- 
derstood, as they are not intended for any but 
those notorious disparagers of sacred functions 
who draggle the robes of the priesthood in the 
sloughs of fanatical politics, and pervert the min- 
istrations of their pulpits to dishonor their Mas- 
ter, traduce our people, and convulse our society. 
To those, sir, I mean my remarks to apply, who 
are truly the representatives of that dissatisfied, 
incorrigible race of meddlers which the Religio 
Laid so aptly illustrates: " It is but dubbing 
themselves the saints of God, which it is the in- 
terest of their teachers to tell them they are, and 
their own interest to believe; and after that, they 
cannot dip into the Bible but one text or another 
will turn up for their purpose." Ay, sir, this 
willful perversion, or convenient manipulation, of 
texts to their purposes, is a not inapposite illus- 
tration of the poetical dictum, 

" C(Elutn lion aiiiiiuirn iiuu.irit qui trans mare ciirrunt;" 
— a change of climate, but no change of spirit, 
from good Old England to good New England. 
With us it seems to have put on all the appear- 
ances of a disease of chronic character. The most 
repulsive of its indications 1 find in the distortion 
of the text of St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Gala- 
tians, the only one whicii they could succeed, by 



11 



such distortions, in tinkering into a condemna- 
tion of slavery, against the clear precepts of the 
Mosaic law, and the no less lucid injunctions of 
the Apostle's charge. This condemnation of sla- 
very, sir, I find our good friends invariably at- 
tempting to contrive, by a perversion of the text 
of the epistle, in the face of the mandate of the 
law, and of the teachings of the Savior, through 
the lips of His Apostle. He, sir, was besieged by 
qil,estions from those " foolish Galatians" of the 
East, whom I think I have not wronged by a 
comparison with our " Galatians" of the North. 
And, sir, with the tartness — nay, with the fierce- 
ness — which we know would sometimes stir the 
great Apostle, he asks them whatspirit of evil has 
drawn them within its influence.' and exclaims: 
"There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither 
bond nor free ; there is neither male nor female: for 
ye are all one in Christ Jesus. " (Galatians, chap. 
iv.,28.) 

Well, sir, what does this mean? And, with its 
meaning, what does it prove against the direct 
precepts of the old covenant and the repeated in- 
junction of the new dispensation, both of which 
recognize tiie rule of bondage, and settle the rela- 
tions between the master and the slave ? St. Paul, 
in the act of explaining away the doubts and scru- 
ples of his converts, in the sense of the words 
which he addresses to them, evidently realizes 
the words of his Divine Master, to show them 
how noble, liberal, and civilizing are those spirit- 
ual doctrines which overstepped the antagonism 
of races, disregarded the distinctions of political 
society, and even overlooked the natural differ- 
ences of sex, to gather every human infirmity to 
their solace, and call every human condition to 
their hopes; to raise up every grade of lowliness 
to the supernal glories of heaven, and to abate 
into humility every excess of inordinate pride, 
even into the very abjections of earth. They were 
doctrines, sir, which tended to dispel every vestige 
of what had, up to the time when they were pro- 
claimed, been witnessed in the pagan world — a 
society of incongruent contrasts! A society of 
Jews, exclusively claiming for themselves the 
heavenly promises of God ! A society of Greeks, 
who, though monarchs of the intellect, were shut 
out from the veriest glimpses of true spiritual life ! 
A society with slaves, who, though reduced to 
their condition of bondage by the imperscrutable 
decrees of the Almighty mind, who, though bonds 
of the body, under the law of man and of God, 
had a soul for the promises and the inheritances 
of the Word ! A society of masters, who, them- 
selves initiated into the revelations and the hopes 
of that Word, refused the communion of its bless- 
ings to the slave ! A society of males, who, by 
virtue of the first disobedience and of the primal 
fall, wielded over woman the unchecked and irre- 
sponsible authority of the household ! A society 
of females, who, secluded from all the concerns 
of life in atonement for the original agency in that 
fall, and condemned to social inferiority, groaned 
in splitude, and obeyed the authority! 

If the reading of the declaration of the Apostle 
be not thus — and it is proved to be so by the whole 
context of tlie chapter, which looks to the " sub- i 



stance of things hoped for" through the workings 
of the spirit of faith; proved to be so by a chapter . 
in which opposition is set up between the works 
of the flesh and the influences of the spirit of faith 
— then would the exegesis of our religious ideol- 
ogists, and especially of our Yankee theologians, 
write St. Paul, the eminently practical man and 
pointedly keen logician, guilty of the veriest of 
absurd propositions and untenable doctrines. Jew 
and Greek, bond and free, male and female, he 
knew to be living and substantial entities, which 
no word of his could speak or explain away. He 
could not mean that the species Jew, or the species 
Greek, of the human family, could be fused into 
something that was neither Greek nor Jew. He 
knew that the inexorable law of races, if not the 
iiving entail of blood, protested against the idea 
of such a thing. He could not mean that the bond 
and the free could so cohere as to form a neutral 
third. He knew that the laws of the Code, the 
protection of which he himself had once invoked, 
and the obligations of which he fully understood, 
repelled the obliteration of the distinction. He 
did not mean that man and woman could lay down 
their peculiar characteristics; and realize the im- 
possible androgynus of Plato, for he was no mean 
adept in the philosophies of the Grecian school; 
and both the law of creation and the intentions 
of God forbade the dream. Something firmer and 
truer, therefore, than any Grecian tenet or Pla- 
tonic dream, he knew to be in the declaration of 
the Book, " inaleand female made he them;" and 
: he equally knew that he had received no authority 
and no power to undo the work of the Almighty 
hand. What he meant, and what is evident from 
the words of his lips, is, that fusion and absorp- 
tion in Christ, which belongs to a "kingdom not 
of this earth;" but no change, even the slightest, 
in the various relations of life, which were sanc- 
tioned by the spiritual teachings of his Master, 
and controlled by the temporal laws under which 
he lived and taught. 

Have I, Mr. Chairman, committed the same 
wrong with which I charge these traducers of 
the South? Have I suppressed anything? have I 
: distorted anything? have I misapplied anything, 
which the law of man, or, higher still, the law of 
God, has written down in relation to this misun- 
; derstood or perverted question of slavery? Have 
I not, sir, shown that they of the North, who 
have causelessly taken up this question of sla- 
very — what have they to do, sir, with a sin which 
does not attach to i/ieir skirts? — have Inotshown, 
sir, that they cannot make slavery the subject of 
: their denunciations and falsehoods without dese- 
cration of the law of God and falsification of the 
I precepts of His Gospel? Under what conditions 
stand we now under which the same New Eng- 
land has not stood ? As ourselves now. New Eng- 
land, the whole of New England, once bought, 
' sold, and held slaves. Having, within the last 
, seventy-five years, had slaves as general adjuncts 
I of their communities, the possession of slaves 
i must have then been deemed no violation of the 
! law of God, which they now charitably impute 
to the South. 
But, sir, from the moment that their slaves were 



12 



emancipated, or from the moment when, from ! 
what cause soever, they ceased to have any upon i 
whom to pxercisetlie scruples of their conscience 
or force the blessings of their relie;ion ; they dipped 
into that repository of texts to which Dryden ad- ' 
verts, and they discovered that slavery is a god- 
less abomination and a heinous crime. Havin_a: 
no slaves of their own, they immediately, under ; 
the auspices ofOld England hypocrites, who boast 
of no mean representatives in New England, 
turned to the South to apply their late discovered 
gospel doctrine of the abomination and sinfulness 
of slavery. Sir, sir, will these people compel us 
to believe that they are fools as well as hypocrites ? 
What ! they who were the special saints and 
agents of God in the motherland; they who, driven 
away from Old England, through the marshes of 
Holland, to the eternalPlymouth Rock, tobecome 
the saints and agents of God in New England, [ 
upon this continent, where, unless I mistake, God ' 
had made a lodgment some century before their ; 
fathers' cars had been cropped and their fathers' 
tongues been slit, at the tithings and market- 
places of the land over the waters, for their head- 
strong, pragmatic, and meddlesome intrusions, | 
which we of the South are not spared at the hands 
of their descendants! What! they who claimed 
to be the depositaries and custodians of both new 
and old covenant snatched away from the " scarlet 
woman and the man of sin;" they who claimed to 
be the saints by excellence, and the expounders, 
ex professo, of the true doctrines of the gospel of' 
Christ; they, with the pretended condemnations 
of that gospel pressing upon their consciences and 
their souls, remained with slavery in their midst 
as a constant, general fact and right recognized by ' 
Church and State without their consciousness of its j 
violation of the gospel law with which we of the 
South are charged, at the eleventh hour, by these \ 
godly workers in the vineyard of the Lord ! Why, 
sir, not .satisfied with holding and maintaining 
slavery in their midst, not satisfied with owning ; 
slaves themselves — though, with us, they are i 
pleased to call it violation of the law of God — j 
they must even look for accomplices in the viola- 
tion of that law, and, sending their ships over the 
oceans, go in quest of slaves, to import them, and 
to sell them where they were wanted, or where 
they had not yet been introduced. Would they, 
Mr. Chairman, have us understand that their 
fathers, not we, are the " men-stealers"and deal- 
ers in human flesh .' Or else, would they have us, 
in order to save the memory of those good, old 
" Puritan fathers" from the deep damnation of 
Ijcing the original patentees of anti-Christian sla- ! 
very, believe that those worthies, with all their 
claims to sanctimonious purity and evangelical 
grace, were but dolts, who had not yet groped 
their way over the threshold of the New Jerusa- 
Irm which their descendants have since reared.' 
That th'ir fathers were a.s guiltless of knowledge 
of the Scriptures, especially in regard of slavery, , 
as they tin mselves are of the precepts of God and 
the sanctities of truth .-' Would they have us 
believe, in one word, that to tli'i'in, and to their 
brighter lights, kindled at the shrines of Exeter 
Hall, was reserved, once for all, the signal priv- 



ilege of correcting all the unseemly errors of the 
inconvenient law of God.' 

Is the South, sir, to be damned into a change 
of its institutions by virtue of pseudo-Scriptures, 
edited with notes, and exegeses tacked to them 
by Yankee exponents of bogus gospel law.' Sir, 
there is a promise of the Master, " My word shall 
notpassaway, "which sustains our hopes through 
all these assaults of prejudice wedded to malevo- 
lence. Indeed, Mr. Chairman, 1 am even now 
afraid that this malevolence of our slanderers may 
have compelled me to be, in some measure, unjust 
to them in the bearing of my remarks. lam afraid, 
at least, sir, that the persistent <^alumnies, studi- 
ously, contrived, and as zealously disseminated 
against us by our northern friends, may have led 
me to disparage some of their merits, or to with- 
hold much of the acknowledgment of their de- 
serts. I find, sir, one thing which I had over- 
looked. Like us, sir, I find that, in one respect 
at least, they are conscientious observers of the 
law of God in this question of slavery. That law, 
Mr. Chairman, if I have read it aright, established 
two species of servitude — theservitude of the chil- 
dren of Israel, and that of the bondman purchased 
from the heathens around them. Instead of vio- 
lating the law, Mr. Chairman, we have adhered 
to its enactment. We have gone — or rather our 
more thrifty Yankee brethren have gone for us — 
to the dark places of this earth — gone to the hea- 
then and inferior races of Africa for our slaves; 
whilst those who have consented to be " men- 
stealers" for our uses and our dollars, have also 
followed, and in their way, the mandate of that 
law. Some of their menial labor, sir, unless I 
mistake, is drawn from Israel itself. Their free 
paupers and vagabonds are, like Joseph, not un- 
frequentlycast "into the pit;" whilst the Simeons, 
the Zabulons, and the Ashers of goodly New Eng- 
land — our American Israel — show themselves 
nothing loath to chafier away their white breth- 
ren on lime to the " Midianite merchantmen." 

I claim, Mr. Chairman, that both South and 
North are obedient to the law of God. We of the 
South, sir, derive otirslaves from the very regions 
which the Loi-d has designed. They of the North 
have no particular aversion, now and then, to man- 
ufacture a few out of their own kindiedand blood. 
Hut here much of the similitude must cease. You 
and I, Mr. Chairman, know of mtu'e than one in- 
stance in which, when freedom had been extended 
to the slaves as a reward for faithful servicis, the 
gift was declined, and the beneficiary prei'errcd to 
remain in bondage undi'r the roof where he had 
grown, perchance, with the master and the chil- 
dren around him. Yet I think that you and I, 
sir, have yet to learn that any of the sold white 
slaves of the North has ever shown himself so 
much in love with the " peculiar institution" of 
that North, as to refuse the boon offreedom wiien 
his period of involuntary servitude had expired, 
much less to offer remaining under the salutary 
blessings of this Yankee pattern of white, Chris- 
tian slavery ! , 

Thus, sir, have I traced, and, I think, not un- 
fairly, the law as delivered by the Savior, and 
as applied by His Apostles, lu either form, Mr. 



13 



Chaiiman, it is plain and unmistakable. Into the 
supposed tendencies of its doctrines it is not my 
business to inquire, nor yet to look into wluit 
channels of action they may have been forced by 
the errors of human judijment or the warpingsof 
fanatical passions. I am satis.fied to take that law 
as it reads, and to stand by what it allows or for- 
bids in relation to slavery. The Constitution 
of the United States, sir, by the essence of crea- 
tion, by its reservation of the rightsof the States, 
recognizes the sovereignty of those States, whilst 
it di.scards the idea ofa supremeauthority. This, 
sir, is an essence of our organic law. Yet, sir, 
is there a soundly-thinking statesman but will 
admit that, by the contrivance of tendencies, by 
the process of construction, and by the fatality of 
precedents, it is not rapidly putting on, if it have 
not already put on, all the substantial forms ofa 
consolidated government.'' Even so, sir, with the 
institutes of Christianity . The theory of tendencies 
has been developed so far beyond the intents of the 
law-giver that the results of man's speculations 
have been grafted upon his statute as parts of the 
law itself. It is under tliis mania of tendencies, not 
the spirit of truth, that the modern improvers of a 
Divine code have, from the height oftheir perverted 
pulpits, and from the bosoms of their unholy con- 
venticles, been shrieking their denunciations of 
slavery as a sin and a curse, laid at the door of the 
South. The law, sir, as given out by its ibunder, 
will hold in the hollow of the hand. Its precepts 
are written with the perspicuity of the light which 
blazes on the frontlet of the stars. I read the law, 
I ponder its precepts, and I find nothing in it 
against slavery, but what the hands of man would 
wickedly interpolate under the convenient guise 
of tendency. The law of God, Mr. Chairman, is 
an equation, full and com[)lete, made up of the 
modern dispensation and the old covenant. They 
are both results of Divine counsels and expo- 
nents of Divine truth. You cannot touch any of 
its elements, you cannot add to or subtract from 
either of the terms, without vitiating the result. 
The curse is upon those who would do so. Did 



I require any proof of the subsistence of that law 
and of the verity of the Book in which it is writ- 
ten, I would find it in the character of the awful- 
ly terrible language in which the penalties of in- 
fraction are written out in every variety of form 
and for every vicissitude of time. It is not the 
growth of human thought, nor yet the expres- 
sion of human speech. It has the unmi.'>)takable 
stamp of Divine conception and Divine utterance. 
Save where it has pleased the Maker to modify 
it, it stands a.s the expression of His unchanged 
will. It rings, as it has rung through tlie lapse 
of ages. It speaks, as it has spoken across the 
chasms of revolutions, above the tramp of gen- 
erations steadily treading on their pilgrimage to 
the grave; it speaks, even now, with the most 
appalling denunciations which it may be given to 
the mind of man to conceive. It is useless for our 
politico-religious theologians to shriek out, " old 
dispensation and old law; it had its time, and it 
has passed away for a better and a higher lav/." 
What, sir, higher and better law coming from 
God.' Thisisimpious,sir, beyond utterance. This 
is lending to unerring wisdom the failings and im- 
perfections of the human mind. Man may grope 
away at higher and better laws; but God intui- 
tively and ever wills the highest and the best. 

I admit, sir, the fulfilling law; but I deny, from 
pole to pole, that that which was fulfilled has 
passed away ! It is still living, and in our midst, 
touching us at every point of our existence, ab- 
sorbed through every fiber of your legislations 
and codes. Some of the minor regulations of the 
civil and religious law may have been dropped 
— some ritual ceremonies and external forms, 
adapted to other purposes, may have lapsinl with 
the changes of circumstances and of time; but the 
law which, deny it as they may, contains the rec- 
ognition of slavery, and, therefore, the rights of 
the South, isa living, binding law. It is the hand- 
book of our duties and the sun of our hopes; it ia 
the moral law which the Savior has perfected ; and 
that cannot psss away, because the moral law, 
like God Himself, is an eternal essence ! 



